Garden provides food and fellowship in Lee County

Garden of Fellowship creators hope to harvest bushels of produce for Interfaith Charities of South Lee food pantry

Husband-wife gardeners Garth and Katy Errington stand in their Garden of Fellowship at Hope United Presbyterian Church in San Carlos Park. The garden provides fresh produce to the Interfaith Charities of South Lee food pantry.
(Photo:
Annabelle Tometich/The News-Press
)

Story Highlights

Katy and Garth Errington started the Garden of Fellowship at their San Carlos church in April.

The garden produces fruits and vegetables for Interfaith Charities of South Lee

It gives the poor and hungry much-needed access to fresh, locally-grown produce.

The six 4-foot-by-4-foot garden boxes stand a few feet off the ground, their edges overflowing with heart-shaped sweet-potato leaves soaking in the morning sun.

PVC trellises drip with cherry tomatoes in shades of green and orange. More plants sprawl along the edges of this small parcel, sucking what nutrients they can from the sandy soil. In April this little patch of land was nothing more than weeds and rocks, a barren outpost that connected the fellowship hall of Hope United Presbyterian Church in San Carlos Park with a storage building.

Today it is the Garden of Fellowship, a collection of fruit and vegetable-bearing plants grown to provide Interfaith Charities of South Lee with fresh produce for its pantry.

“This is a pilot project, so we’re trying to see how well it works and what kind of benefit we can get from it for our clients,” said Bonnie Olson, Interfaith’s vice president. “The potential benefit is twofold: We get fresh produce for our clients, and we’d also like to teach people how to do this in their own backyards.”

A similar garden is growing in North Naples as well. Garden Angels of the North Naples Church are a group of environmental gardeners that tend God’s earth, teach these principles to local families and share the bounty with others in need. The group recently held its annual God’s Garden celebration with the Village School children to harvest fresh foods such as organically grown vegetables, fruits and herbs for local missions from its half-acre, which has been grown and managed for seven years (see pictures on page 2).

The San Carlos Park garden is the work of Katy and Garth Errington. And it couldn’t have come at a better time for the retired couple. Katy Errington had just finished a 14-week, master-level gardening course through the University of Florida. She was looking to take on a project when Olson approached her with grant money she’d earned to provide fresh, perishable foods to Interfaith’s pantry.

Prior to earning the $20,000 grant from Bonita Springs’ Shadow Wood Charitable Foundation, Interfaith relied on free but spotty donations of fresh goods from the likes of Publix, Target and Winn-Dixie.

Much of the grant money is spent buying produce — bags of carrots and grapes, cups of yogurt, cartons of eggs — to send home with children in its summer lunch program. But Olson set some of the money aside for growing food, too.

The garden’s first harvest, of basil, took place in June.

“I took probably 40 or so packages over to Interfaith. I really didn’t know what to expect, but people wanted them,” Errington said. “It was really, really nice to see.”

Errington, 71, and her 80-year-old husband have made this garden their full-time jobs. They worked with instructors from ECHO in North Fort Myers to understand the intricacies of square-foot gardening, a practice of growing plants in small but intensively cultivated spaces. They use high-quality soils with no pesticides and limited fertilizers, a method Errington calls bio-intensive and organic.

The congregation at Hope United has rallied around the garden as well. They help maintain the drip lines that filter water through the elevated boxes. They trim and feed and replant and harvest. If they’ve done their jobs right they are expecting 11,000 cherry tomatoes to ripen in the coming weeks, plus three to four bushels of sweet potatoes.

“To see the impact fresh food can have on people’s lives is remarkable,” Garth Errington said. “It’s more than just food though, it’s a way of getting people to come together.”

How to help

Interfaith Charities of South Lee

• What: An organization and food pantry serving and feeding residents of south Fort Myers, Estero and San Carlos Park.